Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Short definition
A written, permanent processing rule that tells an agent how to handle a context's incoming material — and not what that material contains.
Full definition
In ordinary usage, a directive is an imperative instruction issued by an authority; in computing, it is an instruction addressed to a compiler rather than to the program. The two senses share a trait useful here: the directive doesn't belong to the content it governs.
In the articles on this blog, the term designates a processing instruction written by the holder of the context, kept apart from the material — a directives.md file facing a context.md — and applied at every ingestion without being asked for again. It is written in the cold, it prescribes, and it dates nothing.
Two levels coexist under the same word. Generic directives hold for any subject: aggregate, keep history, split by theme. Business directives hold only for a given context and encode field knowledge: settle a contractor's homonym by the sense of the email, recognize the same person under their maiden and married names, separate debtors under a hundred euros from the others.
Field usage against normative usage: a directive is almost always born out loud, in conversation with the agent, and becomes a directive in the sense retained here only at the moment it is written into a file so as to hold every time.
Usage in the field
Comes into play in reasoning about structuring a context's incoming information — the move from a single file to a multi-file system, the distribution of what must be duplicated in each thematic file and what must stay unique, and the assessment of a context's maturity by the volume of its specific rules.
Synonyms and variants
"processing rule" when the emphasis falls on the function; "business directive" when it falls on its local character; "instruction" in spoken usage, before writing.
Not to be confused with
- Context — a durable workspace gathering, around a goal, the sources, notes, decisions and drafts of a single subject. The directive says how to handle what enters it; it isn't material of the context, and that is what justifies housing it in its own file.
- Session memory — a written trace, kept over the course of exchanges, of what was done, decided and left pending, meant to be reloaded. It dates everything and prescribes nothing; the directive prescribes and dates nothing.
- prompt — an instruction addressed to a model for a precise request, consumed along with it. The directive outlives the request and applies to the following ones without being rewritten.
- Distillation — the operation that reduces material to what it teaches. The directive is the instruction that governs the operation, not the result obtained.
Examples
"When a person is cited by their surname, find the matching first name; if two contractors share the same name, use the sense of the email to disambiguate." An instruction useless to a human reader of the building association, indispensable to the agent handling the emails in their place.
"Separate the small debtors, under a hundred euros, from the large ones." A processing rule that carries in passing a fact about the building association — the case where the border with the material is thinnest.
Ambiguities / debates
The word circulates in two senses that nothing distinguishes in speech: the one-off instruction given in a conversation, and the permanent rule written into a file. It is the second that holds here, and the difference is operative — only the written rule applies when nobody is there to recall it.